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17 December 2007

When You Own The Words – ‘Illegal Immigration’

George Rebane

[This piece is adapted from a post that first appeared as an Other Voices article on The Union's website on 10 June 2007. The issue discussed here is becoming more important as the presidential candidates seek to differentiate themselves regarding immigration while continuing to confuse and pander to the voters using terms that are designed to please the many while informing the few.]

Disagreement and discontent on the issue of ‘illegal immigration’ reigns in the land. A cause of this confusion is that we use words that carry changed meanings and messages depending on our education and ideology. The objective is to elicit the support on the subject with soundbites and obfuscation that hide the important factors about the issue we don’t want the other side to dwell on. In order to clearly think about and discuss the matter, we need to attach unambiguous labels to a number of distinct cases that involve people from one country going to and abiding in another country.

What is the broad, non-pejorative umbrella term used to describe a foreigner in our country who is not a citizen? The historically accurate term still in the dictionary is alien. Aliens come in the many flavors which we discuss below – tourist, transiting-visitor, immigrant, legal resident, migrant worker, and so on.

What do we want to label the process by which a citizen wants to formally leave our country and go to another country for the purpose of setting up long-term residence there with the intent of becoming a citizen of that land? And what do we call that person? Well, the historical labels that have served us well and are found in the dictionary are emigration and emigrant. We use the ‘e’ form of the word (think of ‘exit’) to denote the perspective of the country from which the journey begins. People leaving our country are emigrants who want to emigrate to another country. And a very important note here is that the desires of the destination country do not enter into these definitions. The ‘formal’ part of emigration may, however, involve the government from which the emigrant departs.

What do we want to label the process by which a citizen of another country wants to formally enter our country to establish legal residence here and, perhaps, apply for citizenship? And what do we call that person? Again the historical labels in the dictionary which continue to serve are immigration and immigrant. Note that immigration, with the ‘i’ (think of formally coming ‘in’), requires both the immigrant and destination country to carry out the process according to the laws imposed by that country.

After the immigrant arrives and starts going through the process of becoming a citizen or a legal resident, there may come a point when the legalities of the situation require the individual to leave the country. If the immigrant then does something illegal to remain in the country, that person becomes an illegal immigrant. The person legally immigrated here, but is now here illegally.

What do we want to call people who formally enter our country for the purpose of working here for some stipulated period with the stated intention of returning to their country of origin. Again there is a good term in the dictionary – migrant worker. Migrant workers are those who enter the country legally to do some work such as harvesting field crops or serving as a university computer scientist under an H1-B visa. The easiest, perhaps, is tourist, a person who enters a country legally for a limited time and not for gainful employment in order to enjoy some delight that the country provides.

And finally, in light of all the other contingencies covered above, we need a term to call a person who enters our country surreptitiously, outside the law for an unknown and unstated purpose. Again the historically accurate term illegal alien makes the case of this unlawful foreigner semantically clear.

For any discussion of our country’s immigration policy and proposed changes thereto, it is important to be able to unambiguously refer to and talk about all of the kinds of people discussed above for the simple reason that they exist and must, therefore, be treated under such policy. People with ideological and/or political agendas have in this and other areas sought to obfuscate matters by gathering more than one definition under a single label. For example, today we are taught that ‘illegal alien’ is a pejorative term that has undertones of racism. A politically correct (whose politics?) alternative is to lump illegal aliens with illegal immigrants to soften the impact. After all, are we not the ‘land built by immigrants’, and haven’t we always welcomed immigrants to our country, and aren’t we all immigrants so many generations ago?

Answering yes to these is then supposed to make the weak-minded and unmindful gloss over the fine point of being legally welcomed into the country and coming over a fence in the dead of night to avoid the authorities – they are both now simply illegal immigrants. Or if you want to remain inclusive, undiscriminating, and squeaky clean, you’ll call them ‘undocumented immigrants’ and encourage them to be confused with legal entrants who earlier in the day just happened to misplace their driver’s license and Social Security card.

The studied reader is aware of the role language serves in enabling/limiting thought. The well-known Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis gave first scientific evidence of this over eighty years ago, and numerous studies have corroborated it since. The best known popular example of Sapir-Whorf is Orwell’s ‘1984’ that described a (then) future wherein the world’s masses are kept in line by being required to communicate in Newspeak which was continually tuned by the Big Brother government so as to make palatable the state’s description of reality and make thoughts of revolution impossible.

People of good will, who want to resolve the immigration issue to the longer term benefit of the United States as a sovereign nation-state and its citizens, will not want to confuse the national debate through semantic charades. If the above labels need to be updated for reasons yet to be stated, then let new labels be put forth that are at least as specific as the historical ones. And if there are other agendas under the table, then we can watch those who now own the words continue to derail a comprehensive and clarifying public debate.